Fire and Knowledge

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 106.

A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline…. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus…. Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), p. 75.

Try this: For one week treat every idea that comes your way from another person with complete neutrality. Think of yourself as a human Switzerland. Don’t take sides. Don’t express an opinion. Don’t judge the comment. If you find yourself constitutionally incapable of just saying “Thank you,” make it an innocuous, “Thanks, I hadn’t considered that.” Or, “Thanks. You’ve given me something to think about.”

After one week, I guarantee you will have significantly reduced the number of pointless arguments you engage in at work or at home. If you continue this for several weeks, at least three good things will happen.

First, you don’t have to think about this sort of neutral response; it will become automatic….

Second, you will have dramatically reduced the hours you devote to contentious interfacing. When you don’t judge an idea, no one can argue with you.

Third, people will gradually begin to see you as a much more agreeable person, even when you are not in fact agreeing with them.

—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007), pp. 52-53.

But if money doesn’t do it for people, what does? What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not.

—Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (2004), p. 107

Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

—Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007), p. 16

Imagine you’re the CEO. I come to you with an idea that you think is very good. Rather than just pat me on the back and say, “Great idea!” your inclination (because you have to add value) is to say, “Good idea, but it’d be better if you tried it this way.”

The problem is, you may have improved the content of my idea by 5 percent, but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50 percent, because you’ve taken away my ownership of the idea. My idea is now your idea—and I walk about of your office less enthused about it than when I walked in.

That’s the fallacy of added value. Whatever we gain in the form of a better idea is lost many times over in our employees’ diminished commitment to the concept.

—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007), pp. 48-49.

In one of this famous experiments, Asch assembled a dozen or so Swarthmore students and announced that they were taking part in an experiment on visual perception. He showed them three line segments, and asked each one in turn which line was the longest. It was an easy task—the correct answer was obvious.

However, Asch had secretly instructed all but the last person, who was the real result of the subject of the experiment, to say that the medium-length line was the longest. The aim was to see whether the subject would rely on his or her own judgment, or go along with the group.

As it turns out, 70 percent of the subjects caved in to group pressure and said that the medium-length line was the longest. The conclusion was that most human beings, under conditions that are hardly severe, will follow the crowd, even when the crowd is clearly wrong.

—Stephen Leeb, The Coming Economic Collapse (2006), p. 40

Put yourself in this situation.

You are at a train track and see five people tied to the track ahead. A switch is in front of you which will divert the train, but as you look down you see a man is strapped to that track and will be killed. Is it permissible to flip the switch and save the five people at the expense of one?

If you are like most people, you said yes.

Now imagine in order to save the five people, you have to push a stranger in front of the train to stop it. You know for certain it would stop the train in time to save the five people tied to the tracks. Is it permissible to push the man and save the five people at the expense of one?

You probably said no. But the results are the same — the only difference is the method (passive vs. impassive). But in both cases you sacrifice one life to save five.

So why do we see one as moral and the other as immoral?

Here’s the answer Michael Shermer gives:

In the first one the subject is emotionally detached by being one step removed from the killing process—to save five lives by killing one person, one has only to flip a switch to detrail the trolley car. The trolley killed the individual, not the subject. In the second scenario the subject is emotionally involved—to save five lives by killing one person, one has to be directly and viscerally responsible for killing another person.

Moral judgment is not calculatingly rational. It is intuitively emotional. (The Science of Good & Evil, p. 177)

Do you agree?